Joined: Sep 22, 2013 Posts: 5700 Location: Inside my own head
Identity: Human
Hello all. Here's my big resource dump, then. All the things I've collected thus far I'll be posting over time so as to keep the thread fairly active. Feel free to add your own thoughts on the subject matter as they come up, as this will hopefully become a breeding ground for thoughtful guidelines of "do's" and "do-not's".
To begin, here's the first contribution I can track down, one of Tevish's mini-essays, this one on World Building and Sapient Species. Enjoy!
These are the ones from the Mothership. They aren't great, really, but even looking back on them so much later I think they have good ideas in there.
World Building
Spoiler
When you set out to build a fantasy world, the first thing you’re probably going to do is ask how it’s different than Earth (or, if you’re really good, how it’s different than the Generic Fantasy World). You’ll probably give a short answer to that, and start building out from there. I call this a “Gimmick World”: Everything you create centers around the Gimmick. Mirrodin can roughly be seen as a gimmick world (It’s gimmick being “made of metal”). The people have metal bits, the plants are metal, even the water is just another sort of metal. The rest of the setting goes into answering how anything even begins to survive when the world is solid-freaking-metal (or hollow metal, as the case may be). Usually, Gimmick worlds are interesting for a story, but unless something about them moves past just “explore the gimmick”, you’re not going to get any more than that.
Note here that a Gimmick doesn’t have to start in the world. Very often, I would consider a world ruled by your Stereotypical Evil Overlord to be a Gimmick World: All that matters is the Overlord and his reign. Once the heroes inevitably defeat him, the world ceases to be interesting. Gimmick. In some ways, you could see the Gimmick World as being the top-down design of world building: It has a strong concept, and everything else fits to the concept
The other method, one I like a bit better for stories if not for Magic sets, is the bottom-up world: Call it the Rules World, you start not with a single “wouldn’t it be cool if…” but rather by answering a lot of questions and getting the physical (and spiritual, if applicable) laws of your universe and working out from there.
For instance, you need to ask yourself when building a fantasy universe from scratch if Magic exists. The answer to that is usually going to be a resounding “yes!” as this is fantasy, so now you need to ask other questions. Let’s try to bottom-up build a world. We start with Magic = Yes and decide that magic is a good enough place to start. The questions that follow here could be answered in just about any order, assuming they aren’t dependant. Sometimes, I like to start with the source of power, for instance, or the functions available.
Can Mortals use Magic? Yes
Can Anyone use it? No
What lets a person use magic? Inborn Talent
How common is this talent? 1 in 100
Okay, 1 in 100 persons born are capable of using magic in some form. We can probably extrapolate that strength of magic (if variable) is also inborn. Let’s keep going, we’re not even done with magic yet
What can magic do?
This is a big, BIG question when making a new fantasy world. There are so many sorts of magic and most of them are more specialized and limited than the magic we see in Magic: the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons. So what can magic in our new universe do? Well, let’s say it works with the elements of nature: it’s therefore not going to dip into mind control, or effect the soul. Instant death effects would have to be very creative to fit the theme here, so we’re mostly looking at weather magic, water control, producing fire and lightning, and the like.
How is magic used?
Another big one. Do you snap your fingers and have it happen? Do you need reagents like a science? In this case, I’m going to go with (Lengthy) Ritual: Casting a spell is going to take between 10 seconds and 10 hours (longer if, say, the Big Bad needs an end-of-the-world spell), so not useful in combat. Ten seconds may not sound like much, but when people are fighting that’s an eternity for a cantrip.
Where does magic come from?
Ah, the power source. This question is going to determine a lot of the nature of spellcasters in your world (and spellcasters, as different from the familiar, are fundamentally interesting). If the power source is somehow tainted (for instance, a demonic pact made by your ancestors), spellcasters are going to be shunned, maybe hunted. If the power source is internal rather than external, there might be some side effects. This isn’t always going to be a compelling or even an answered question. Sometimes, for instance, you want a world where magic just works and your plot doesn’t really care about the why so much as the how. This is the case in D&D, usually, but Dark Sun actually takes a stand on it as Defilers raze the land of life to power their spells (at least, they did before 4e. No idea if that still holds, I don’t keep up with 4e). Since I’m answering these as I go along, I’m going to say magic comes from the favor of “The Spirits”: poorly understood, perhaps nonsentient entities that may gift children with the power at birth.
What are the costs/restrictions of Magic?
This one may be answered in the previous questions, but if it’s not and you don’t you’re going to kick yourself as you come to the realization that SOMETHING has to stop magic from being the Deus Ex Machina cure-all that it very easily could be. I’m putting this one last out of the complex magic questions because it often draws on the answers to the questions above. An evil power source will often exact a toll, an internal one could very well kill the caster much more quickly than a normal person (or kill them if they get careless). On the other side, magic that’s hard to use or has only a limited and not too story breaking power set is pretty safe and doesn’t need some extra restriction. Basically, think really hard if there’s a good reason why your casters don’t break the plot. If there isn’t, give them one.
As a side note, mana is actually a rather elegant solution to the restriction of magic: if the caster needs to not be awesome, they can simply run out of juice somehow. Neat. However, I’m going to go with unreliable magic for this example world: magic will usually work, but against magical creatures or other magicians, the spirits will often favor one side and abandon the other temporarily
So we have our casters. With chants and prayers to the spirits that blessed them, the earth and sea and sky are theirs to command! This sure took a while but it provides a good framework to build on.
Aside from Magic, you have World and Society to build on. I’m going to go over these a bit more quickly even though they’re what people building M:tG planes are going to care about more.
Society: You need to figure out the tech and politics of your world.
Tech level ranges from stone age to space age and beyond. “Middle Ages” with magic pushing some aspects towards “Renaissance” seems to be standard, though if you’re drawing heavily from classical mythology it’s going to look more like Bronze Age or Iron Age. Now, with what we know of our spellcasters, this all feels very primal. I’m going to go with Ancient Egypt/Babylon for our tech level to reflect this… it gives more interesting societal options than the Stone Age while still having that “OLD” feel. Perhaps there are still some stone age groups sticking around…
Politics are a complicated affair, and it’s in the crafter’s nature to, creating in an hour what it’s taken humanity thousands of years to create, simplify it a bit. Having a single world power is very tempting, but I find it more interesting if, even if there is one overpowered culture, to create countercultures or rivals that make things a little less like the tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Plan..." title=" tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Plan...">Planet of Hats. There are a lot of roads you can go on this, and I have found it useful to sketch a rough map of your world when deciding what the world powers look like. For our purposes, we’ll say there’s one Egypt-like central power, with a population and static cities giving it the edge over nomadic groups at the same tech level. Culture in a fantasy universe can be either really complicated or really simple. Since this is just an example, they’ll be polytheists worshiping thin pastiches of the Egyptian gods, while other groups revere the Spirits that grant magic directly. There is SO MUCH MORE that can be done with this section that it’s not even funny. I could probably write ten thousand words on the matter and still not be done crafting an example society.
Now, as far as the world goes, a map is a good place to start but a poor place to end. There are a lot of questions here, some of which can get very complex. I’m going to simplify that to two “BIG” questions.
1) Does your world use familiar physics?
You’ve introduced magic onto your world, so this is NOT a trivial question. Is the world round, a planet orbiting a star in a basically familiar universe, or is it something else? Perhaps the world is flat, and the stars are glittering gems implanted on a perfect invisible crystal dome that arches over the world. For this example, we’ll go weird: the world is flat, and there are cracks: great rifts in the world that lead down and out into seas of infinite nothingness. This certainly makes the geography… interesting.
2) Does your world use fantastic species?
The answer to this is either “no” or “which?” an answer of no indicates that there are only humans and familiar organisms, while any other answer requires you to decide between a myriad of humanoids to an entire ecosystem unfamiliar to humanity. I’m going to say that in this world, we might have a few giant flyers, but nothing else. It can be interesting to build with either nothing or just humanoids as well, but unless I’m going to build the food web from the bottom up, I like to keep to familiar or magical-only nowadays, and focus on the society unless the world is BIG.
Sapient Species
Spoiler
Broadly put, for the purposes of this discussion, an “alien” has the following qualities. First, an Alien is not human, or a member of any other Earth species. Second, an Alien is sentient. Third, an Alien is a species, not a unique being. Fourth and most mutably, we will assume that an Alien is a physical, living, biological entity. While these are the only “hard” rules to apply to this discussion, we can also assume your Alien is being created from scratch. Note that while I have chosen to use the term “alien” and therefore the following words will probably contain a lot of Science Fiction baggage, I feel what I have to say also applies to nonhuman sentients in fantasy.
Alien Biology
This is, perhaps, the most logical place to start when creating an alien: what does it look like and how does it live? If you know what role in your story the aliens have to fill this might come later, but for the purposes of a neutral exercise, we’re starting here.
There is a lot to consider when you’re creating the physical nature of an alien. The first question that probably comes to mind is this: are the aliens going to look like us? By in large, this tends to be answered with a resounding yes; aliens in film and television are largely played by human actors while it also helps to have sympathetic aliens look like relatable humans while frightening aliens can be just human enough to strike that chord of fear and distaste known as the “uncanny valley”. We aren’t bound to do so, but it’s very convenient that most aliens follow a human body plan.
There is, even, an arguable good reason for aliens looking something like humans. First, any alien is going to have some manner of gathering information (senses) and some manner of processing information (A Brain). From that alone, because neurons don’t transfer information instantaneously, you’re going to want the most important and focused of your sensory organs as close as possible to the brain that’s going to be processing and collating their information. Meanwhile, it’s going to be very useful for aliens from most conditions to have sight: Light has this funny way of getting everywhere and being modified by objects, so if you process light hitting you as information you’re going to learn a lot about your surroundings very quickly. This means the alien will probably have eyes; sightless aliens are possible, certainly, but the sighted are going to be more common in a universe or setting that approximates your own. Now, because you want the most utility out of your sight, you’re going to have the following: Eyes placed forward, at least two of them for depth perception, and eyes situated up near the top of the alien for a wider field of vision. The brain follows the eyes and together you have, surprise surprise, a head! Meanwhile, an alien by our definitions is also going to need some means of locomotion: slithering or stranger are possible, but legs of some description are actually quite nimble and efficient – somewhere between two and six balances balance and the processing power required to coordinate said legs rather well. Meanwhile, the creature will also need some sort of appendage capable of manipulating objects with dexterity, one or more arms or convenient replacements therefore. This provides a lot of leeway for very nonhuman builds, but also suggests that the human structure is not entirely out of left field from the construction of life as we know it.
If your aliens are more or less like us – possessing most of arms, legs, a torso, a head, a recognizable face – then your task is mostly to decide how they differ from us: Aliens like Vulcans and Orcs can mostly be said to be “humans except…” they have green blood and pointy ears, or green skin and pointy teeth. These are the most comprehensible aliens, and the more like us the more relatable they become (but the more alien or over-the-top their culture has to be to be worth having any distinction between the alien and humanity)
If, on the other hand, your aliens are NOT like us, remember what I mentioned above – aliens need senses, locomotion, and manipulators. They need a way to intake and process sustenance, and a core that processes the input from their senses. Within these needs, though, there is room for a myriad of possibilities diverging entirely from humanity. Even so, it is useful to take your inspiration from somewhere in nature, but it isn’t required. I find it helpful to start with the sentient creature as a non-sentient animal: how did it survive? This is, of course, if an idea for an alien visage does not simply present itself
Example 1: For this example, we’re going to take a human-alien. They are like us, except a strong, prehensile tail, skin with a metallic golden or coppery sheen, and wide, dark eyes.
Example 2: For this example, our alien is going to be largely nonhuman. Its lower body is much like a slug, and it slides along with a powerfully muscular foot. A torso of sorts rises from this, and six tentacles arranged radially from it manipulate objects. Finally, the creature’s head crowns that torso, a bloated mass of flesh surrounding a radially symmetric, fanged mouth that widens vastly. Just above the mouth, the creature sports a dozen, writhing eye-stalks
Alien Psychology
Nothing says that aliens have to think in vastly different ways than humans, or even in systematically different ways, but the fact of the matter is that they tend to: the human aliens need to be distinct from humans somehow, and the truly strange aliens look too odd for most people to accept that their minds work just the way ours do.
So, how do Aliens think? One easy shortcut, especially for human-aliens, is to say that “they think like us, except…” and the “except” being anything from a singular focus on logic to a general disregard on higher thinking in favor of bloodshed. Alien psychology so built tends to be… exaggerated. They will often have a singular focus on one aspect of life, and all their culture will be built around it. For instance, aliens that are strong will probably be warlike: they are likely to apply great strength as the attribute most common to their gods, and their leaders will be the strongest among them chosen by a contest of strength. This is good on the fly, but when you think about it, it gets a bit grating: why don’t the creatures that are, in comparison to humans, weak and frail, choose those that are strong in comparison to others of their kind to lead? Since their metric should be their own average, it makes just as much sense as the strong-aliens doing it.
The alternative is much harder, of course, but I think I find it more rewarding: think of how the creature, based only upon its own position in the web of life and its own attributes, what sort of thought patterns would it develop? You end up creating a very intricate culture this way, and you have to in order to understand an individual of an alien rendered in this manner.
I think, perhaps, I have less to say about culture, because unlike physiology it has no set rules and is not even needed: Some aliens are too incomprehensible to have what we would recognize as a culture, and if humanity cannot comprehend their mindset than all the writer needs to know is what they do. Of course this stretches the bounds of “aliens are sentient”, because they serve a role little different than any rampaging monster that way, but I still feel that truly incomprehensible aliens are aliens if the fact they have some strange intelligence is recognizable.
Example 1: Our human-aliens have a prehensile tale and large eyes. This suggests that they might be nocturnal and might be arboreal. Since they’re so close to humans, they’re probably social mammals as well. Now, a noctournal, arboreal creature is probably nor a predator, even if it’s an omnivore and is probably keeping to the treetops and coming out at night to avoid predation. Make that sentient, and these creatures are probably relatively meek and inoffensive. At the very least, they aren’t aggressive: they probably have the capacity for great viciousness if threatened (Fighting like cornered rats). Their culture will, mimicking some primates, be a matriarchal hereditary monarchy.
Example 2: Our strange aliens are big and powerful, and almost certainly carnivorous or omniviorous. However, slugs not being known for their speed I’m betting more along the lines of scavenger. Either that, or everything else where its from is just as slow as it is, allowing it to be a “fast” predator by relative speed. Since they look so strange, it’s safe to dispense with a lot of the trappings of human civilization. While not fiercely individualistic enough to fail to build communal dwellings, their territorial instincts mean they are NOT pleasant creatures to be around, even for each other. Quite probably, when thrown into a mix where they aren’t the top dog, they react badly. I also think they may very well be quite methodical. If we go for a sci-fi species, they probably carefully strip a planet of resources, maximizing yield, and then move on.
Alien Technology (or Magic)
The last thing to consider is what the aliens do. In science fiction, what are their ships and weapons like? Their other technologies? In fantasy, you still have to consider what technologies they would develop unique from other cultures, if any, and also potentially what magic they access and how.
I’m going to be brief with this: Since so much of the tech and magic depends on the psych, It’s easier to do things by way of example. Suffice to say that tech/magic development can run in one of two lines, sometimes both…
Technology or magic that COMPLIMENTS the alien builds on its strengths: the smart alien makes an even smarter supercomputer, the tough alien specializes in protection magic, the strong alien gets power armor. This builds on and exaggerates a theme
Technology or magic that SUPPLIMENTS the alien compensates for what weaknesses it has: the smart but frail aliens create deadly war machines, the tough but slow aliens have a strong focus on mass transit, and the strong but dull alien uses mind-addling magic to bring everyone else down to its level.
Example 1A: Let’s send our human aliens to the stars, and give them technology that compliments them. Since they’re observant and defensive, their ships have better scanners and shields than average, but tend to run light on weapons: these aliens won’t fire first.
Example 1B: In fantasyland, the tech and magic of our aliens will supplement them. They certainly don’t have the prodigious physical strength of something like an orc, and in combat tend to be a cowardly lot. Their forest homes also make for poor farming and not a lot of good stone to build fortifications from. However, they are very skilled craftsmen, and experts in the use of poisoned arrows that can fell even the largest foes with a single sting. Their magic mostly weakens or debilitates foes, while on the other end probably encouraging growth and plenty. In Magic terms, they’d probably be Black/Green while in D&D (3.x) terms they might use Conjuration and Necromancy magic
Example 2A: The fantasyland version of our strange alien has magic and “technology” that compliments them: They’re stuck in the stone-age and wield massive stone clubs as they’re basically made of muscle. Still, little can withstand an onslaught of d6 or so club hits bashing it to bit. Their magic is vaguely understood and shamanistic, flowing practically from their guts. It suffuses them and grants them the ability to regenerate, or even more strength, or some extra speed: basic buffs.
Example 2B: Taking our strange aliens to the stars, their technology supplements their obvious problem with speed – their ships have a “jump” drive rather than a usual warp-drive, allowing them appear and disappear instantaneously. Meanwhile, they use huge amounts of automation both to sustain their colonies and go to war: their quick-moving aerial drones gas entire cities on the attack.
I might try to make a few more of these notes pages, but I make no promises.
Last edited by Lord LunaEquie is me on Thu Jun 04, 2015 12:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
@Cateran: That seems like a thread of its own, but I'll try to briefly answer the question.
The color pie is the basis of all of Magic: The Gathering and this includes the plane design. Mana shapes the world, and this needs to come through on your plane. Apart from that, Magic's setting is, as a wise man once said, "all the settings", so there's no hard rule.
Another important factor are planeswalkers, who can give unique perspectives on settings and form the connection between all the other worlds.
So would a plane incorporating these things, and using races already present in MTG, automatically be considered an MTG plane?
I'm gonna go with "maybe." There are some aspects that contribute to the "feel" of Magic, that aren't just those factors. One thing I often think about is the anti-transhuman message present in some cards and storylines, which can be part of that "feel." There are some things that connect Magic planes that I find hard to put into words, but I've sorta got a "feel" for them and I notice when they're not present.
Mm, yeah, I think it might be a little looser than that, though mana is a pretty big deal and should be woven one way or another into the fabric of the settings. But there is sort of a sense you get for what works and what doesn't...
One way I've always found useful in tying otherwise shaky or weird planes into the setting is to use more obscure mechanics of the Multiverse. Like for our wild west plane we used the notion, present in some earlier storyline materials, of a manaless land turning into basically instant-death because everything needs mana to survive.
Welcome to the forums Cateran Hope you stick around and get involved!
Also hey Yxoque Let me know if you need advice on where to start digging back in. We've been... busy. Real busy. Also I need to remember to talk to you about the alternate history setting thing that's being ported to the Wiki right now... it might be relevant to our discussions re: using :EM technology elsewhere experimentally.
Hello, I'm new to this section of the MTG fandom. I've been a big fan of the stories hinted at in flavor texts, especially The Theriad. Since you all have made some fan planes in the past, I'd like to know just what makes a plane an MTG setting. Looking at the cards, it seems like there's a few commonalities between expansions: mana, distinctive races tied into those colors and stringent adherence to the color pie. So would a plane incorporating these things, and using races already present in MTG, automatically be considered an MTG plane?
Welcome to our dingy little corner of cyberspace. Don't mind the blood, Barinellos tends to leave a spectral trail, is all.
Anyways, the main thing that makes a Magic plane, as opposed to a Magic story, is the integration of the color pie in some way, shape, or form. This doesn't mean a strict adherence, as you put it, to everything we see from Wizards; everything is flexible to an extent. Creatures can be color-shifted, nations and races don't need a perfect balance of all five colors, lands can be missing some of their normal shape or show influences outside their normal color range -- you can go really crazy and it all really depends on how well you can justify your choices.
Take the plane of Ihn Gallad, for example. It doesn't feature any listed colors, and several of the intelligent races feel like they've been color-shifted, but it feels like a Magic plane for integrating iconic M:tG creatures and making those color connections bleed through the words rather than symbols. Or take Arbagoth, a very varied and rich plane that is totally weighted toward the green end of the spectrum. Every feature of the plane is listed by color, and every place has at least a touch of green, but it feels perfectly at home among the many planes we and Wizards has put out over the years.
There are points that we are less flexible with, of course. Too much color-shifting in one plane can be seen as too far from Magic's baseline; we don't allow too many unique fan-made races; and a plane can get "too busy" -- i.e. having too many unique and interesting features for its own good. Generally, the more you push the boundaries, the more you have to balance it out (with "normal" M:tG planar features) and the more you'll have to justify it (like showing how integrated into the planar history, ecology, economy, culture, etc. it is).
Luna, or anyone else in the MEM: do you have examples of fan planes that are too busy and or unique?
Personally, I feel that Matahorua (I may be butchering the name) is trying far, far too hard to the point of impenetrability. It is an example of "too unique", because for a lot of people the Polynesian-ness is overbearing and hard to pronounce and even remember the names correctly.
Sertaria, which I was a part of developing, is another that kind of gee a little overly busy for my liking. The base concept which you can already read in the Archive thread is that it's an anti-Shards-of-Alara (wedges instead of slices), but another feature which was talked about during development was that the plane was so "large" that is sucked in small half-planes as moons in its sky. That was something I don't think it needs anymore because of how large it already is (like Alara, essentially five planes in one).
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Also, how do you feel about mechanics from one plane, like imprint or soulshift, appearing on fan made planes?
I can't think of any that have been used specifically, mostly because we don't deal with card-making all that often, but there's not much on that end that's off-limits. Like Tevish said, it mostly has to do with flavor and history of the plane, so if you can make it fit, it's fine.
There's definitely some elements of Sertaria that are probably a bit too different or exaggerated to the point of not really providing a good or coherent basis for stories...
There's definitely some elements of Sertaria that are probably a bit too different or exaggerated to the point of not really providing a good or coherent basis for stories...
Yes. It was one of our first big projects and people (including myself) were still trying things out. I would tackle a project like that differently if I'd do it now. I still think Sertaria is a solid plane, even if it is a bit disjointed. I think some things can be saved by removing some aspects (such as the possibility of talking animals on Afresa) and fleshing out smaller aspects of the cultures.
Cateran, my perspective is that there's nothing wrong with weird, so long as it makes sense, as self-contradictory as that may seem.
I think when people start to get into trouble is when they do weird things just for the sake of doing weird things, which tends to be a lot less interesting in practice than it sounds in theory. But there are a lot of ways to do "weird" in a manner which had an internal logic and rationale to it, and weird can become magical under those circumstances. For example, we've had characters who were turned into living ships, we've had someone cursed to speak only in rhymes, and we've had a western-themed plane with trains and guns. All those things are "weird," but they also work, because a lot of thought went into providing contexts and explanations for them which made sense.
Within the general rules of how Magic works, thoughtful weird can be wonderful. It's weird-for-weird's sake which usually winds up being less than the sum of its parts.
When I think of how "weird" should work, I think of the circus. You know how most circuses used to have side-shows full of all sorts of strange and weird things? But the main show, the main purpose of the circus wasn't the "weird," it was the "amazing." The "weird" was there on the side, just to heighten the atmosphere and draw people into the world. To me, that's how "weird" should work in a story or a fiction world. Sure, drop in a few "weird" things from here to that. Just make sure the main part is the "amazing."
Since I'm in an open sourcey mood I thought I'd quickly drop a post here with the list of the open source programs that I used to assemble Seasons of Dusk.
Barinellos and I used Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign for the graphics but it looks like there are comparable open source alternatives in the form of GIMP (analogous to Photoshop): http://www.gimp.org/ Krita (analogous to Corel Draw): http://krita.org/ Scribus (analogous to InDesign; I haven't tried this yet): http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus Inkscape (analogous to Illustrator; again, I haven't tried this yet): http://www.inkscape.org/en/
I highly recommend trying out LibreOffice and Sigil (if you know HTML and CSS) since they're powerful tools and it'd be great for folks that uh... aren't me to be able to put together anthologies in the future. I'd be glad to do some tutorials for how I produced Seasons of Dusk if people are interested. It'd be great if we could actually run multiple anthology projects concurrently, and I think if we want that to be successful it'd be good to broaden the knowledge base where production is concerned.
(In closed source news, though, I DID manage to get CS4 reinstalled today. It still works, thank goodness. So thankfully I can still open all the CS4 files that have M:EM content--they didn't get lost in the crash.)
If you're do ANY audio-editing at all, then you should have Audacity. It is a wicked-powerful audio editor and recorder and I don't even know what else because I've barely scratched the surface of its features. Even people who make money off of their videos and music swear by it. Oh, and did I mention it's completely free and open-source?
I'm going to go ahead and bump this since we've been talking about the Timeline again recently. And also because I did some googling and it looks like this: http://timeline.knightlab.com/ might be useful for us since we have a collective drive account, and this would let us make a rather attractive looking object.
So, yeah, I salvaged my character-naming mini essay.
Giving a character a name is, I find, one of the hardest parts of inventing a new character, yet it is also one of the most important and one of the easiest for new writers to make a mistake in. In general, there are a few rules I have found for naming characters, many of which also apply for giving names to other entities (Places and things) as well. Before I get into those, though, I shall say that the golden rule is this: you must be able to pronounce it. That is not to say that it cannot be difficult or trying: 'Cthulhu' for instance is not immediatley obvious in its pronunciation, but as an approximation of an alien sound it does its job just fine, and certainly the version designed for human mouths can, in fact, be pronounced by humans.
The first rule is the matter of length: A characters name has no strict length limit, but the best I find are two or three syllables, with four at the outside. Any more than this should generally be avoided, or if there is a good reason why a character would have a monsterously long name, they should be given a nickname to which they can be easily refered, even in the narrative itself.
The second is to content. Certainly, most fantasy names are uncommon, and there is some temptation in the search for exoticness to have a name not only be long, but contain various strange characters and diacritical marks that are not commonly found in English. In most cases, this is a mistake -- I allow, in general, one bizarre character per name, and then only if it is used correctly. The marks that I tend to see, and might allow are as follows
': With very little doubt, the humble apostrophe is the most overused bit of punctiation found in fantastic names, perhaps because it can be safely added without violating the zeroth rule that names should be able to be pronounced. In reality, the apostrophe has one proper use and that is contraction: I bear no rancor towards "F'lar" from the Dragonriders of Pern, because his name is explicitly contracted. In fantasy names, though, there is a second potential use of the apostrophe, and that is to represent a glottal stop, because there is no better way to represent the sound. This still does not excuse using more than one.
-: A hyphen is a connector, and when used indicates that two (or more) separate parts are being put together. In most cases, though, why not use a space? There are a few legitimate, stylistic reasons: a hyphen can be used when, in concept, there is a compounding going on without contraction.
è: The Accent Grave forces a stress. Most commonly, it should be used on a terminal e such as is the difference between Niume (Nigh-oom) and Niumè (Nigh-oom-eh). If you know french and suspect your readership will too, I guess you can use it elsewhere.
Other Accents: Not generally kosher, as they're usually chosen more for look than for sound. Lim-Dûl, you may have noted by now, violates my rules for naming. and you know what? If he were a MEM character I might ask: "Why not Lim Duul, or even Lim-Dul?". And god have mercy on you if you start STACKING accents and diacriticals, because I will have none.
!: The exclemation point is the only character that is not at least a standard english letter underneath that can be used in place of one. Specifically, ! represents a "Click" as you see in some african languages. Don't take it appearing on this list as free reign to use it: there had better be a DARN good reason.
These are the strong rules of Name Creation. What follows are Suggestions for the Creation of Good Names.
The third rule is that you should use cross-cultural conventions where appropiate. Modling a name after an existant language is a VERY powerful tool, because it immediatley says a lot about the character and where the character is from. In fact, I find that earth or earthlike names have more power of description than totally fictitious ones. For example compare these names: Llywen, Poltina, Tlalaxa. All are female names, and atleast quickly recognizable as such, but they have different cultural associations. The first, Llywen, is evocative of the British Isles (Specifically Wales), while the second, Poltina, evokes a more scandanavian or eastern european feel with its conventions -- it's a harsher name because of its associations as well as its sounds. The last, Tlalaxa instantly brings with it the entire Mayincatec look and feel.
The fourth (and final, for now) rule is to have consistancy in your naming: Aerith and Bob is not, I repeat, not desireable. Don't make a distinction to readers unless you want things to be distinct: It's okay to have names cut from a different cloth when the characters themselves are, but characters with similar backgrounds (if they aren't cosmopolitan) shouldn't have completley dissimilar names.
Hey, so I noticed this thread has been pushed down the page a bit. I've still got a few things I wanted to unload (so I don't have to keep the tabs open anymore- I mean, so that everyone can benefit) of What I've Been Reading about Writing.
(Or, I guess, technically you said two of my magic words.)
Elmore Leonard is one of my very favorite writers, and I think it's fair to say that his books had some of biggest influence on making me want to try my own hand at writing. His prose style always just seemed so effortless - he made it look so darn easy.
Except, that little crack of daylight between "close to right" and "right" turns out to be momentous, because the style here feels slightly forced in exactly the way that Leonard's work never did. His best writing just felt so natural and organic; you were left with the sense that he wasn't making up the story so much as he was a fly on the wall watching his characters at work, taking dictation, and just conveying the notes to the reader.
Anyway, if anyone ever wants to jaw on and on about Elmore Leonard, y'all know where to find me!
Just because I feel like it really takes an example to explain what I mean when I talk about how natural, how easy Leonard's prose feels, here are the first couple of pages of Get Shorty. (I'm retyping these, so any mistakes are mine -- apologies.)
Excerpt from "Get Shorty"
When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off. One his wife had given him for Christmas a year ago, before they moved down here.
Chili and Tommy were both from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, old buddies now in business together. Tommy Carlo was connected to a Brooklyn crew through his uncle, a guy named Momo, Tommy keeping his books and picking up betting slips till Momo sent him to Miami, with a hundred thousand to put on the street as loan money. Chili was connected through some people on his mother's side, the Manzara brothers. He worked usually for Manzara Moving & Storage in Bensonhurst, finding high-volume customers for items such as cigarettes, TVs, VCRs, stepladders, dresses, frozen orange juice... But he could never be a made guy himself because of tainted blood, some Sunset Park Puerto Rican on his father's side, even though he was raised Italian. Chili didn't care to be made anyway, get into all that **** having to do with respect. It was bad enough having to treat these guys like they were your heroes, smile when they made some stupid remark they thought was funny. Though it was pretty nice, go into a restaurant on 86th or Cropsey Avenue the way they knew his name, still a young guy then, and would bust their ass to wait on him. His wife Debbie ate it up, until they were married for a few years and she got pregnant. Then it was a different story. Debbie said with a child coming into their lives he had to get a regular job, quit associating with "those people" and bitched at him until he said okay, all right, Jesus, and lined up the deal with Tommy Carlo in Miami. He told Debbie he'd be selling restaurant supplies to the big hotels like the Fontainebleau and she believed him--till they were down here less than a year and he had his jacket ripped off.
This time at Vesuvio's, they finished eating, Tommy said he'd see him at the barbershop--where they had a phone in back--turned up the collar of his Palm Beach sport coat for whatever good it would do him and took off. Chili went in the checkroom to get his jacket and all that was in there were a couple of raincoats and a leather flight jacket must've been from World War Two. When Chili got the manager, an older Italian guy in a black suit, the manager looked around the practically empty checkroom and asked Chili, "You don't find it? Is not one of these?"
Chili said, "You see a black leather jacket, fingertip length, has lapels like a suitcoat? You don't, you owe me three-seventy-nine." The manager told him to look at the sign there on the wall. WE CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST ARTICLES. Chili said to him, "I bet you can if you try. I didn't come down to sunny Florida to freeze my ass. You follow me? You get the coat back or you give me the three-seventy-nine my wife paid for it at Alexander's."
So then the manager got a waiter over and they talked to each other in Italian for a while, the waiter nervous or he was anxious to get back to folding napkins. Chili caught some of what they were saying and a name that came up a few times, Ray Barboni. He knew the name, a guy they called Bones he'd seen hanging out at the Cardozo Hotel on the beach. Ray Bones worked for a guy named Jimmy Capotorto who'd recently taken over a local operation from a deceased guy named Ed Grossi--but that was another story. The manager said to the waiter, "Explain to him Mr. Barboni borrow the coat."
The waiter, trying to act like an innocent bystander, said, "Somebody take his coat, you know, leave this old one. So Mr. Barboni put on this other coat that fit him pretty good. He say he gonna borrow it."
Chili said, "Wait a minute," and had the waiter, who didn't seem to think it was unusual for some **** to take a jacket that didn't belong to him, explain it again.
"He didn't take it," the waiter said, "he borrow it. See, we get his coat for him and he return the one he borrow. Or I think maybe if it's your coat," the waiter said, "he give it to you. He was wearing it, you know, to go home. He wasn't gonna keep it."
"My car keys are in the pocket," Chili said.
They both looked at him now, the manager and the waiter, like they didn't understand English.
"What I'm saying," Chili said, "how'm I supposed to go get my coat if I don't have the keys to my car?"
The manager said they'd call him a taxi.
"Lemme get it straight," Chili said. "You aren't responsible for any lost articles like an expensive coat of mine, but you're gonna find Ray Bones' coat or get him a new one. Is that what you're telling me?"
Basically, he saw they weren't telling him ****, other than Ray Bones was a good customer who came in two or three times a week and worked for Jimmy Cap. They didn't know where he lived and his phone number wasn't in the book. So Chili called Tommy Carlo at the barbershop, told him the situation, asked him a few times if he believed it and if he'd come by, pick him up.
"I want to get my coat. Also pull this guy's head out of his ass and nail him one."
Tommy said, "Tomorrow, I see on the TV weather, it's gonna be nice and warm. You won't need the coat."
Chili said, "Debbie gave it me for Christmas, for Christ sake. I go home, she's gonna want to know where it's at."
"So tell her you lost it."
"She's still in bed since the miscarriage. You can't talk to her. I mean in a way that makes any **** sense if you have to explain something."
Tommy said, "Hey, Chil? Then don't **** tell her."
Chili said, "The guy takes my coat, I can't ask for it back?"
Tommy Carlo picked him up at the restaurant and they stopped by Chili's apartment on Meridian where they were living at the time so he could run in and get something. He tried to be quiet about it, grab a pair of gloves out of the front closet and leave, but Debbie heard him.
She said from the bedroom, "Ernie, is that you?" She never called him Chili. She called him honey in her invalid voice if she wanted something. "Honey, would you get my pills for me from the sink in the kitchen and a glass of water, please, while you're up?" Pause. "Or, no--honey? Gimme a glass of milk instead and some of those cookies, the ones you got at Winn-Dixie, you know the chocolate chip ones?" Dragging it out in this tired voice she used since the miscarriage, three months ago. Taking forever now to ask him what time it was, the alarm clock sitting on the bed table a foot away if she turned her head. They had known each other since high school, when he'd played basketball and she was a baton twirler with a nice ass. Chili told her it was three-thirty and he was running late for an appointment, bye. He heard her say, "Honey? Would you..." but he was out of there.
In the car driving the few blocks over to the Victor Hotel on Ocean Drive, Tommy Carlo said, "Get your coat, but don't piss the guy off, okay? It could get complicated and we'd have to call Momo to straighten it out. Okay? Then Momo gets pissed for wasting his time and we don't need it. Right?"
Chili was thinking that if he was always bringing Debbie her pills, how did they get back in the kitchen after? Be he heard Tommy and said to him, "Don't worry about it. I won't say any more than I have to, if that."
He put on his black leather gloves going up the stairs to the third floor, knocked on the door three times, waited, pulling the right-hand glove on tight, and when Ray Bones opened the door Chili nailed him. One punch, not seeing any need to throw the left. He got his coat from a chair in the sitting room, looked at Ray Bones bent over holding his nose and mouth, blood all over his hands, his shirt, and walked out. Didn't say one word to him.
_________________
"And remember, I'm pullin' for ya, 'cause we're all in this together." - Red Green
Well, I have decided it's been long enough since the last time something useful as a resource/reference, so to continue with my "What I've Been Reading about Writing" entries, here's the big man himself, that rodent of the dark, from Ari Marmell's own site, Things They Don't Tell You When You're Learning to Write.
It's short, but it's from a writer we're probably all familiar with, which has graced us with his presence in the past and been supremely humble about it (I personally learned he doesn't like being called Mr. Marmell), so I'm sure it's a good inclusion.
Hey, would you look at that? It's been a week today since I posted something along the lines of writing advice. So, here's another installment of "What I've been Reading about Writing":
This is something Keeper actually linked to on googlebook quite some time ago, but I bookmarked it for future reference and such. There appears to be more, similar articles from that site, but I haven't checked them out.
Advice from one of my biggest inspirations on the writing process
Steven Erikson
To beginning writers: think big, paint your dream to the last detail, and then work out how to get from here to there. It's a step-by-step process that is, at its heart, one of self-discovery. When the writing gets hard, don't evade: make fists and wade in, because somewhere at the core of that difficult passage lies honesty. You may not like what it reveals, but you'll know it to be real. It's my feeling that honesty is the most important thing a writer must reach towards: intellectual honesty, emotional honesty, spiritual honesty. It's not easy, since it dismantles your own assumptions (about how people think, how the world works, how you think, how you work, and so on) and can at times reduce you to a quivering wreck. But it's also addictive, and relentless, and ruthless. Writers who write to evade; writers who take short-cuts, intellectually and creatively, constitute the run-of the-mill crowd. You want to stand apart, as best you can, and not let go of your ambition, or settle for second best. Imagine a world out there filled with honest writers, and then set off to join that crowd.
People can like my stuff or hate it, and some will call it arrogant of me when I say I can look in the mirror and know that what I did in these novels, I did as honestly as I could. So, all you beginning writers: trust me when I tell you it's a good feeling, that sense of having done the best that was possible in you, and then leaving it out there (even to see it vilified) without apology. Could I have done better with the series, novel by novel? Possibly now, but not at the time I wrote each one.
Don't talk yourself out of writing if that's what you want to do. When I first started up, I was left slack-jawed by a certain trilogy called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but rather than giving up in the face of that, I took it as inspiration. I wanted to do what Donaldson had done; and what Herbert had done with Dune. But I also wanted the wry elegance of Zelazny's Amber series, and then the cranky edge of Glen Cook. In other words, take what you like that's out there and make your way, word by word, sentence by sentence, to stand beside them. Don't ever worry about picking up someone else's style: that's temporary and part of the learning curve for beginning writers. Before too long your own voice and your own style will shake out: it will contain bits of every writer you ever liked, and that's how it should be.
"...the historians will write of our suffering, and they will speak of it as the suffering of those who served the Crippled God. As something … fitting. And for our seeming fanaticism they will dismiss all that we were, and think only of what we achieved. Or failed to achieve.
And in so doing, they will miss the whole **** point.”
Characterization has been on my mind recently, and I wanted to share a little piece of writing from Planescape: Torment. That game was hugely influential for me for a number of reasons, and I think that one of the things which stands out about it is the quality of the character design, and the distinct voices which the writers managed to create for each of your companions. Along those lines, here's Morte's character biography, as told by the disembodied floating skull himself. I think it's remarkable how much of a feel you can get for this very strange character from just a couple paragraphs:
Quote:
Of course you got questions about me -- you probably have questions about ALL sorts of things. Let me boil it down for you: when you've been as dead as long as I have... without arms, legs, or anything else, you spend a lot of time thinking, y'know? I figure it's been a few hundred years since I got penned in the dead book, but time doesn't really tally up the way it used to... without that mortality thing pressing down on you, all the days and nights kind of blend together. So you think about this, and you think about that... and the most important piece of wisdom I've learned over the past hundred or so years is this: There's a LOT more obscene gestures you can make with your eyes and your jaw than most people think. Without even resorting to insults or taunting, you can really light a bonfire under someone just with the right combination of eye movements and jaw clicking. Drives them barmy! If you ever get beheaded and your skin flayed from your skull, I'll show you how it's done. I got some real gems, chief -- they'd drive a deva to murder, they would.
I know what you're thinking: I'm dead. I've lost so much. It should have sobered me up to all that joy I missed, all those loves I've lost. Some people get all depressed about death -- they haven't TRIED it, of course -- but one thing they never seem to realize is how it changes your perspective on things; it really makes you take a second look at life, broaden your horizons. For me, it's pretty much made me realize how many dead chits are in this berg and how few sharp-tongued men like myself there are to go around -- you spin the wheel right, and your years of spending nights alone are over!
Shallow? I'm not shallow. I just don't get caught up in all that philosophy and faith and belief wash that every berk from Arborea to the Gray Waste rattle their jaws about. Who cares? The Planes are what they are, you're what you are, and if it changes, fine, but things aren't bad the way they are -- and I should know. Go on, ask me some questions about the Planes, or the chant, or the people, or the cultures -- when you end up like me -- without eyelids, that is -- you end up seeing a lot of things, and I can tell you almost everything you need to know.
It's like this: We're in this together, chief. Until this is over, I stick to your leg.
C=(P*D)-(A*O) Comedy is equal to pain times the distance from the viewer to the sufferer, minus the attachment between the distance to the sufferer times the offensiveness of the humor. Briefly put, something is funny when someone gets hurt and we aren't called to feel much sympathy for them, nor are we offended by their suffering due to relating to them.
CB=(P*D*O)/A Black comedy on the other hand is the product of the pain, distance, and offensiveness, divided only by the audience's attachment to the victim. Theoretically, any form of comedy also has a coefficient of comedy, which is different for black and standard comedy, but the coefficient varies by viewer. Black Comedy is at its best when it is, in theory, VERY offensive, but the audience has no attachment to the victim, becuase they are either unlikable or highly unrealistic.
D=[P*T]/A Drama is equal to Peril times time, divided by the subject's Plot Armor. A very perilous situation can be dramatic with little time, or a moderatley perilous situation highly dramatic if it hangs over a character's head for long enough. Plot Armor, while never absolute, deadens the effects of peril as the audience is unwilling to believe a highly armored character will fall prey to the peril.
A=[(Pi-Pr)*Ts]*T Plot Armor (A) is equal to the scale initial plot arc, minus the scale of their plot arc which remains, times the screen time the character claims, times the coefficent of the story's Tone. Thus, Plot Armor decays over time, resulting in more deaths in the third act than elsewhere. Similarly, a character with a mild arc that is untouched, a character with a nearly complete major arc, and a character with a massive major arc who spends much of their time in the background rather than apparent to the reader may have similar values of plot armor. The coefficent of Tone is unnecessary when comparing characters in the same work (since it will be the same for all of them), but is vital when comparing works: every character in a childrens' cartoon likely has more effective plot armor than nearly any character in a horror movie.
It's a little-known fact that Plot Armor approaches but can never reach 100% -- a terrible fate can ALWAYS befall ANY character, it is simply more likely to befall characters with a lower plot armor sooner, in proportion to the plot armors of other characters in the same work. The least armored character is the most likely to suffer, but even the most armored character can, in theory, become the victim. At the same time, a low or even nonexistent plot armor does not guarantee danger to strike.
_________________
"Enjoy your screams, Sarpadia - they will soon be muffled beneath snow and ice."
I'm a (self) published author now! You can find my books on Amazon in Paperback or ebook! The Accursed, a standalone young adult fantasy adventure. Witch Hunters, book one of a young adult Scifi-fantasy trilogy.
Plot Armor. Bah! I'll kill of any of my characters who looks at me cockeyed! And I won't feel badly about having written them to look at me cockeyed in the first place!
Yeah, I tend to really, really like rhythmic structures more than rhymes, and I think part of it is because of the music of the stresses. I've found that iambic pentameter, in particular, isn't too awful hard to write once you get into the rhythm of the thing, and I love love love odd syllable structures that are paired with a lot of alliteration, assonance, and consonance.
(In case, uh, anyone is curious, I do have one sort of halfway decent example of my poetry available... two years ago for my final project in my Milton course, I wrote a series of short pieces based on Blake's idea in Marriage of Heaven and Hell that true creativity, the possibility of something new, could only come from a merger of good and evil. The Children of Heaven and Hell is what came out the other end of that idea. Many of the pieces start with actual passages of Paradise Lost before sort of... veering off in another direction, so I had to try to match Milton's iambic pentameter closely enough that the transfer between his bits and my bits didn't feel too jarring. I think the most interesting idea is probably the third one, Satan's Repentance, but the most successful poetically, in my estimation, is the second to last one, Eve's Mercy. I'm actually really happy with the word choice in that one, to be honest.)
(Anyway that's why I want to do the fall of Sedris as a long form poem in Iambic Pentameter.)
EDIT:
Derp, I totally forgot the reason I came here! Yxoque just posted this article on his Tumblr, which is about grammar-as-art and why prescriptive grammar is silly and Hemingway is overrated
Yxoque's Tumblr post talked about above:
Quote:
Nobody. Understands. Punctuation. Composed on the 7th of June in the year 2014, at 12:26 PM. It was Saturday.
On the first day of what would be a depressing and alienating two-year trudge under the fluorescent lights of a rural high school, a soft-spoken bald man stood in front of my English class and looked at the ceiling as if trying to remember what he was going to say.
"So. In the past few years, you've all learned that an essay should be five paragraphs. The first paragraph states your argument and includes a topic sentence. You develop your argument over the next three paragraphs, and finish with a conclusion paragraph that starts with the words 'in conclusion' or something."
Silent assent from thirty smallish heads.
"Forget it."
Small gasps. Heresy!
"They probably taught you never to start a sentence with 'and' or 'but.' Forget it. Don't use adverbs? Forget it. Forget," he pointed at us, "all of it."
My class drove multiple teachers to tears, and substitutes swore blood oaths on our principal's desk sealing their promise never to teach again until we were all dead and buried under crossroads, but this man never even had to raise his voice. He's among the pivotal figures that made me want to write, and not give up for all the years I was terrible at it.[1] He understood writing, and just as important, he understood his students.
A little too well, actually; he had to resign after they caught him banging a student.[2] Let's focus on the writing part. He knew the rules that had been ice picked into our heads over the years were just ways to get something out of the kids who didn't want to write and give the teachers a few things to decorate with smiley faces and Xs. Some of the rules were stylistic nonsense passed down by Hemingway to better distinguish American writing from British frivolity and ensure we never expressed amusement during the cold, hard, manly work of scraping a pencil across paper. Some rules were artifacts from other languages that don't apply to English in any logical or meaningful way. Some rules were just the usual authoritarian madness of doing it because once somebody smarter than the rule makers said something offhand that the rule makers actually understood and it became out-of-context gospel.
They always promised us that if we mastered all the rules, we could find our voice later, which would have been true if they just meant the basic rules of grammar, but they meant all the rules pitched in the non-bald-not-banging-student-guy classes, and following all those rules would have left us with exactly one voice with which to go write another grammar textbook. Then, in the middle of these rule lectures, they give us Shakespeare, a man so unsatisfied with the state of his language he invented words even when he didn't need to rhyme.
Bald guy reminded us writing was art. He reminded us that English is a rich and flexible language, and sifting something new out of it is half the fun. He reminded us that the structure of a sentence can be funny or sad. Most of all, he reminded us that writing is about communication. Writing is the most explicit art form; you can communicate enormously complex ideas or explore the oddest and most trivial quirks of the human experience.
Because everybody has a blog or is at least spitting bile at teenagers in a YouTube comment, people are by and large remembering this or figuring it out. The results are mixed, but at least the power and variety of expression through writing is on more constant display.
Yet just as the grammar Nazis are being crushed by the weight of a billion "how r u" text messages, the punctuation terrorists are coming out of the woodwork and fighting over the use and non-use of Oxford commas, and the rule war is being waged anew because nobody seems to understand that punctuation is as much an art as the rest of writing. Instead, they smugly post contrived sentences that mean different things depending on the placement of commas, because this tactic was so successful in fixing that thing that time.
Yes, you can use punctuation in incorrect ways, but that does not mean there is only one way to use it. A friend recently told me publishers don't care whether you use an oxford comma or not, as long as you pick one and stick with it. This is stupid. If punctuation obscures or distorts the meaning of a sentence in an unintended way, it is wrong, but apart from that, punctuation is about rhythm. An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea. Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow, because writers are trying to transfer the voices in their heads into yours. You can hear punctuation in speech: politicians talk in periods, Morgan Freeman is liberal with the commas, and Jon Stewart is a master of parentheses. Lewis Black made a career out of the exclamation point while Dennis Leary barely uses any punctuation at all. If you told Dennis Leary he needed more Oxford commas, I can only hope he'd put a cigarette out in your eye, but I heard he quit smoking.
Punctuation started with periods that told the speaker when to take a breath, and as both a longtime proponent of using the run-on sentence to better communicate the ranting rage in my head over the nonsense that people choose to fight about in this country and a person who is occasionally asked to read his work out loud, I've come to value this original function in a visceral way. Parentheses suggest a subtle aside (Jon Stewart lowering his voice and head) and can provide commentary or extra information while keeping you in the moment.[3] Sometimes you want to keep the pace breakneck so you use em dashes—the noblest of the dashes—to let the reader know the ride ain't stopping and something big is coming at the end.[4] In this case, em dashes are doing something similar to a pair of commas, which can also denote side info but they do it more casually, and parentheses. You can use a single em dash to serve a purpose similar to a colon—making it absolutely clear that the thing after the dash follows from the thing before it. It can also be used to signal an abrupt change in—you know, screw it, em dashes do a bunch of stuff, you get the picture. A colon is a way to introduce things and to join ideas, and says something definite: this part of the sentence is important, and you can say it in an authoritative voice. Its purpose gets muddled with the semicolon, which is like a weak link between ideas; you can forget all the stuff about clauses: a semicolon joins two sentences without a period or 'and' or 'but' or 'so' or whatever. Semicolons, colons, periods, dashes, parentheses, commas, and even Oxford commas overlap each others' jobs far more than rules lawyers would like. The situation is confusing and fluid, which is why everybody is afraid of the semicolon: it's the only punctuation mark that's honest and says, "Well I kinda do a little of this and a little of that."
English is a mutt of a language, inheriting ludicrously contradictory spellings and grammars from other languages. The fact that word and whirred are pronounced exactly the same while lead and lead sound different depending on what you mean (unless the former is in the past tense in which case it's spelled differently and pronounced like the latter) should tell us English is not so much a black tie affair as it is a soccer riot with a body count. But if we accept the chaos that informs the language, there's a lot of expressive power to be found.
In conclusion, the next time somebody makes a strong case either for or against the Oxford comma, you can assume that their minds are simply collapsing because they looked into the abyss too soon. If make his point clear, Yoda could, give a **** about Oxford commas, nobody should.
1 - 2013, for example.
2 - This used to say senior instead of student. For some reason, my friend decided to fixate on this, because saying senior was giving the teacher "street cred" whatever that means. This sparked a slew of text messages that started with things like "HE'S STILL A **** SOCIOPATH" and descended into an insane and condescending rant about pitying artists. I think he was projecting. My argument was that you should be specific in descriptions, and, well, there is kind of an important distinction between a 13 year old and a 17 year old, and not just because one of them is above the age of consent in the state of Maine. On the other hand, I walked by a bunch of high school kids the other day and realized that at my age, everyone under twenty looks ten. Anyway, this is all way too much discussion for a throwaway line referencing something I know almost nothing about that happened 20 years ago, but now it says student. You **** happy Matt? Your weird moral outrage satisfied? Whiny bitch.
3 - As opposed to a footnote, which is used for the same purpose but interrupts the flow, and can be used as a punchline, especially for self-referential jokes.
4 - Well, not this time, but usually.
Last edited by Lord LunaEquie is me on Sun Jul 19, 2015 9:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I feel like just referencing FILM CRIT HULK was all the reference you needed, honestly.
...Man I should post some of HIS articles here. Particularly his article(s? I can't remember if they're separate or not) on why the 3 Act Structure and the Hero's Journey are both terrible and need to stop being slavishly adhered to.
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Hope you stick around and get involved!
Let me know if you need advice on where to start digging back in. We've been... busy. Real busy. Also I need to remember to talk to you about the alternate history setting thing that's being ported to the Wiki right now... it might be relevant to our discussions re: using :EM technology elsewhere experimentally.
Milov Lask: Philomancer 
Tsuchigo: Orochi Jade Mage 
